Passing, Cultural Performance, and Individual Agency: Performative Reflections on Black Masculine Identity

Abstract

This performative article uses the trope of “passing” as reference to crossing racial identity borders as well as to intra/interracial issues of identity and authenticity. Passing is constructed as a performative accomplishment and assessment by both the group claimed and the group denied. This article is structured around three divisions—passing as cultural performance, the social construction of identity, and the quest for self-definition of socially mediated expectations. All issues are centered within the specific concerns of Black masculine identity. In the process, the essay also seeks to establish the notion of an integrative ethnography of performance that envelops the critique of a performance as a part of the overall textual presentation of experience.

Embodying Gender, Age, Ethnicity and Power in ‘the Field’: Reflections on Dress and the Presentation of the Self in Research with Older Pakistani Muslims

“…Ellingson (2006), for example, has described how her embodied identity as a cancer survivor, which partially revealed itself through her knee brace and her pronounced limp when she walked, made her participants who were themselves oncology patients feel she could relate to them. In a similar way, the significance of the researcher's body and bodily participation to fieldwork processes and researcher-participant relationships lies in the performative nature of social identities more generally - including gender, age, social class, racial, ethnic and religious identities, whereby the expression of belongingness within one social group or differentiation from another involves a display of the identity in question through performative acts (see Butler 1990 and 1993; Entwistle 2000; Fortier 2000; Mani 2003; Raghuram 2003; Alexander 2004; Abdullah 2009; Twigg 2009; Zubair 2010). Hence, as illustrated by Okely (2007: 71), researchers often have to learn to adapt their bodily performances and actions - including the way they dress, and the way they walk and move - in order to fit in with, and be accepted among, those they are researching.…”

My Childhood Neighborhood: A Critical Autoethnography

“…What were the dominant social norms that I performed in public? The norms of those who lived in the center of the country and spoke "proper Hebrew" (see Alexander, 2004)? Or was I mimicking the norms of the locals?…”

Praktik i praksis – et arrangeret møde med dansk arbejdskultur?

“…Et ganske anderledes perspektiv på individets handlemuligheder og positioner indenfor et givent praksisfaellesskab finder vi indenfor Cultural Studies-feltet, hvor teoretikere som Sara Ahmed (Ahmed 2012) og Bryant Keith Alexander (Alexander 2004) beskriver deres oplevelser af positionering som den kulturelle Anden (the black other) indenfor et institutionaliseret arbejdsfaellesskab. Deres beskrivelser illustrerer, hvordan normer og forventninger knyttet til en given professionel identitet er influeret af normer og magtforhold knyttet til køn, race og religion, som bliver afgørende for individets deltagelse og handlemuligheder.…”